OLDaily

A Q&A with David Bourget, Director at the Centre for Digital Philosophy
Helen Eassom, Wiley Humanities Fest, 2019/11/18

Though this article is focused on philosophy, it could equally well apply to any number of disciplines, including educational technology and new media. "I can see... a much more comprehensive service that partly replaces traditional writing and publishing... there is far too much to read. .... Sooner or later, we are going to be forced to re-examine how we do things and look for efficiencies. To my mind traditional publishing is hugely inefficient. Most of the words in an average, considered-well-written paper are in some sense superfluous: for the right audience, you can usually boil it down to a few statements...  A lot of it is setup (background, definitions), rhetoric, and forays down the garden path of objections and replies to try to anticipate others’ thinking." As someone who reads (and summarizes!) these papers for a living, I heartily agree. Via Daily Nous.

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The Seven Road-Tested Habits of Effective Artists
Ayun Halliday, Open Culture, 2019/11/18

I can vouch for all seven of these habits, and practice them myself. Here they are, rephrased a bit: do the work, keep putting it out there (my version of this rule: "quality ships"), steal without ripping off, keep learning, take time off, don't be threatened by others' opinions, don't be ruled by them either.

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OKP Learning Experience Bingo 1.0
Nate Angell, 2019/11/18

The diagram is the star of this post (get the full-sized version on Google Slides here). It's a representation of the Open Knowledge Practices Learning Experience Rubric 1.1 (OKPLER 1.1). "While the rubric was maybe attempting to answer a question like: “How open is this learning experience?” I’m hoping this bingo card and its future agumentations can help people answer a fundamentally different question: 'What dimensions of openness does this learning experience incorporate and generate?'" I like the thought that has gone into this.

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Getting Past Competency Model PTSD
Steven Forth, TeamFit, 2019/11/18

Here's what I have said about competencies in the past: "we have a hard problem, that of defining what it takes to be an engineer, or to be recognized as one. With competencies, we take this one hard problem, and create out of it, ten equally hard problems, of defining each of the competencies required." Or in this article: "Traditional competency models cause stress because they are rigid and top-down. They are generally kept in spreadsheets and Powerpoint, and in the more advanced applications, they captured deep into relational databases. By the time they are developed they are already out of date and because they tend to be developed by HR working with expert consultants the people whose work they describe do not recognize themselves or their work in the model." I don't actually think you can fix this (and certainly not by adding more structure). But hey, competencies still have their fans.

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Why We Should Expand Our OER Advocacy to Commercial Publishers
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2019/11/18

I will credit David Wiley with not being afraid to oull on the tiger's tail. Citing examples like Flat World Knowledge, Linux and Microsoft's open source projects, he makes the case that commercial enterprises have made large contributions to open source and open content. "Advocates helped businesses understand the ways that adopting an open source model would be good for their business." He also argues that commercial publishers should embrace OER because "their (existing closed) content is too expensive and its licensing precludes remixing... royalty payments (and the expensive and convoluted systems for tracking when they need to be paid) are like anchors dragging behind publishers’ business models."

I can agree with all this. And in an economy where viturally all the productive capacity is in private commercial hands, it makes sense. But I would still rather see open content be a public good, produced by the community - this especially given the example of Flat World, which just sudenly decided one day that their content wouldn't be published openly any more. Live by the "better for business" argument, die by the "better for business" argument. From where I sit, the logic begins with what's better for society - for the people, first of all, then government and institutions, and then, finally, business and commerce. To the extent that focusing on commercial publishers detracts from that, I am not interested. Image: Nature.

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Educational Technology and Education Conferences for December 2019 to June 2020, Edition #42 Revised
Clayton R. Wright, Stephen's Web, 2019/11/18

Clayton R. Wright has distributed a revised version of the conference list for the coming half-year (139 page MS-Word Doc). He explains, "Normally, within a week after I publish the conference list, I receive 3 or 4 changes or additions via e-mail. This time, I received 18 changes or additions. Though this is still not significant as there are over 1,800 conferences on the list, I thought I would send out an updated version to a few of you who are likely to share the list with others. You never know whether it is just the conference one is seeking such as a conference on problem based learning (one will be held in January 2020 in Australia, another in Napa, California in June) or a conference on "At-Risk and Struggling Students" that will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. There is also the inaugural conference for "Open/Technology in Education, Society and Scholarship" that will take place at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada at the end of May 2020." As always, we thank him for his dedication and contribution to the community.

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The Open Ed identity crisis
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2019/11/18

This paper is from a few weeks ago, but it got lost in the shuffle of recent travel, and yet is an important contribution to the discussion around the Open Education conference, so I'm adding it here. Martin Weller references a paper he and some colleagues wrote last year identifying different flavours of the open education movement (or coalition, or whatever) and observes here that the Open Education morphed "from a conference that was built around the possibilities of what openness could mean in education, to one largely focused on the open textbook as artefact." Maybe that's true; I don't know. But I would agree with his sentiment that "there’s a big, wide, open world out there folks, go explore."

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